Bloomberg Administration Is Developing Land Use Plan to Accommodate Future Populations

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: November 26, 2006

Faced with a shrinking inventory of vacant land, the Bloomberg administration next month will unveil its goals for accommodating the city's growing population over the next 25 years and the municipal services that nine million or more New Yorkers will require.

Chief among the priorities of the mayor's Sustainability Advisory Board, led by Daniel L. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development, is how to reclaim as many as 1,700 acres of polluted land -- brownfields and other former industrial parcels -- and transform them into environmentally sound sites for schools, apartments and parks.

Among the other goals being explored by the 17-member board, which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appointed in September, are improving commuting times (at 39 minutes on average, now the highest of any big city in the nation), maintaining and protecting the drinking water supply, reducing sewage overflow into the city's surrounding waterways during stormy weather, and reconciling the region's growing energy needs with clean-air standards.

The board is expected to outline its draft agenda by the end of next month, then place it before civic groups and the public for further debate. In mid-2007, the mayor will present its final goals -- and strategies to achieve them.

Driven by higher birth rates among Hispanic and Asian New Yorkers, the influx of about 100,000 immigrants a year and a housing boom that is attracting newcomers to each borough, the city's population hit another peak last year, of 8.2 million. If those trends persist, the population is projected to reach at least nine million in the 2020's.

Responding to the mayor's pledge in his State of the City address last January to produce a ''strategic land use plan'' to deal with a city of nine million people, Mr. Doctoroff said: ''We have the capacity through rezoning and underutilized land to go well over that number. But you cannot simply divorce the issue of growth from the infrastructure required to support it.

''It opens up great opportunities only if the growth is smart,'' he said at the time, explaining that growth that fosters economic development could, for instance, help balance the city's budget.

''Growth for its own sake is not necessarily good,'' Mr. Doctoroff said. ''We have a structural budget deficit. You want to ensure that the growth that takes place helps to ameliorate that deficit rather than exacerbates it.''

City officials declined to publicly elaborate on their proposals in advance of the advisory board's announcement. But some of its goals were foreshadowed by two of the largest rezoning revisions in city history -- of the Brooklyn waterfront in Greenpoint and Williamsburg and the Far West Side of Manhattan -- both driven by Mr. Doctoroff.

The two major zoning changes, coupled with other development proposals, including the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, were aimed at revitalizing underutilized land for economic development and expanding the city's property tax base. The zoning changes were accomplished, in part, by tying them to the city's timetable to apply for the 2012 Olympic Games.

The city lost its Olympic bid, which included the ill-fated proposal for combining a stadium for the Olympics and the Jets with an expanded convention center on the West Side. But Mr. Doctoroff maintains that he also viewed the Olympics as a vehicle to drive the sort of longer-range planning in which local governments rarely have the resources, or the vision, to indulge.

''Ultimately the most important point was to finally create the conditions for the West Side to develop,'' he said.

The stadium proposal itself generated the most criticism, and even some of Mr. Doctoroff's supporters said he did not do enough political spadework to see it through. But Mr. Bloomberg, among others, says that Mr. Doctoroff has not gotten his due.

''Doctoroff, by the time he gets done,'' Mr. Bloomberg said recently, ''will have a greater impact on this city, I think, than Robert Moses, in a much more democratic world where there's a lot more community input and a lot more supervision from the courts and the Legislature.''

Planners who were interviewed agreed that the biggest growth constraint that the city faced was accommodating nine million people within its boundaries. Unlike newer cities in the South or the West, New York is not empowered to expand by annexing neighboring communities. But developers are seeing new possibilities for land that was once the site of industry, as manufacturing and maritime uses of the waterfront have declined.

The advisory board's biggest challenge, Mr. Doctoroff has said, is ''how are we going to generate the land in a city where land is our scarcest resource to provide for the facilities that will support growth.''

''It could be a zoning change, an investment in a form of transportation, it could be park space, working with Con Ed and KeySpan on energy needs,'' he continued. ''Power plants take acres and acres of land, but if we're going to grow we've got to provide that.''

One possible source is the inventory of 1,700 contaminated acres in the city, many of which, consultants to the advisory board believe, can be reclaimed through improved technology. The technology has to be efficient enough, however, to make whatever is built there affordable.

If the brownfields were sufficiently decontaminated, those sites alone could accommodate 2,600 schools.

''We can't afford to write off the land,'' one advisor to the board said.

According to a Department of City Planning survey of land use, one- and two-family homes consume more space than any other category -- more than 27 percent -- followed by 25 percent devoted to open space and recreation, 12 percent to multifamily housing, 4 percent each to commercial and industrial uses, and a little more than 1 percent to parking. About 7 percent of the land surveyed was identified as vacant.

Separately, transportation officials say streets and highways take up about 32,000 acres, which would rank them third in an overall inventory of land use.